


Nanami, Touga, and all the girls of the world

by khilari



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Gen, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 04:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18189524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khilari/pseuds/khilari
Summary: An analysis ofHer TragedyandRomance of the Dancing Girlsfocusing on Touga's phone and Nanami's choices.





	Nanami, Touga, and all the girls of the world

Touga is decidedly not saving all the girls of the world — except maybe in the “oh help, I’m alone on Christmas” sense — but he does sometimes seem to be sleeping with them. Like Dios he’s perpetually available to everyone except his own sister. Unlike Dios, he’s a real person. He’s every girl’s wish fulfilment fantasy, hardly ever turning them down and never dumping them, but in practice that means he’s in the arms of one while on the phone with another and constantly stringing along a crowd of girls who haven’t quite been dumped.

It’s not altruism, either, Touga’s doing this to stroke his own ego and fulfil his constant need for attention. He may well believe he gives them something in return for what he gets. The shadow girls mock him as a “nice guy Casanova” and, while that’s not the western use of “nice guy”, it’s similar, isn’t it? Touga thinks girls owe him sex because he treats them nicely — at least in comparison to someone like Saionji.

Nanami spends a lot of time trying to locate a rival for Touga’s attention. He’s interested in Anthy, he’s interested in Utena, if she can just get rid of whoever it is he’ll notice her again. When she sees him on the phone with one girl while with another in the greenhouse her reaction is jealousy, but also a sort of horror. She doesn’t want to face the fact she doesn’t have a single rival she can fight because Touga doesn’t care about any of those other girls either. How do you fight indifference?

Nanami’s attempts to locate a rival in some ways play into Touga’s promiscuity. Both in that he does seem to know she might kill anyone who gets too close to him as she did the kitten — he’s not surprised when she pulls the dagger on Utena — and in that he can rely on Nanami to drive off any girl who’s been hanging around him too long without him ever having to be the bad guy and say “no” to them. His use of her as a scapegoat is one of the ways they echo Akio and Anthy; the little sister keeps the prince away from the world and takes the resentment that should be Touga’s for encouraging expectations he can’t possibly fulfil.

Stealing Touga’s mobile phone is rooted in Nanami’s realisation there is no single rival. She’s not trying to threaten a specific girl into staying away from Touga now, she’s trying to cut him off from all his admirers at once. It’s not clear whether Touga intends to bait her into taking it. He doesn’t mention the mobile phone before he goes to have a shower and isn’t using it, but the way he looks up as she leaves means he immediately knows what she’s done. This is probably the moment Nanami gets closest to actually taking Touga away from all the girls of the world, attempting to literally steal his connection to them.

It doesn’t work. Nanami can stand at the window holding the mobile phone and yelling at every girl who calls it, Touga will still stand below her at the centre of a crowd of girls. All she’s doing is telling off girls he’d already moved on from.

Utena’s appearance, and the fact that Touga does have at least some kind of feelings for her, gives Nanami a focus for her anger. It probably comes as a relief to have someone she can fight, but there’s too much going on here and she and Utena fail to understand one another. Then Anthy and Akio step in to get Nanami back to the tower and play perfect siblings for her.

Nanami’s realisation that Touga might not be her brother is punctuated by the mobile phone ringing, confronting her with someone else living what she fears most herself — Touga’s indifference after apparent closeness.

While she’s trying to sort out her feelings, Touga arrives wrapped in a bathrobe, ostensibly looking for his phone. This is almost certainly an excuse since he knows perfectly well Nanami has it and doesn’t push the issue. Normally it’s Touga who says “we’re not kids” and pulls away when things get weird between them (even if he set up the weirdness) this time it’s Nanami and he doesn’t like it at all. He backs off for about ten seconds, comes back with an offer of a kiss and then walks out.

I applaud Nanami realising that Touga is never going to give her the space she needs to figure this out and just getting away from him for a bit. I also think it’s easy to miss that she’s stayed with Miki and Juri already before moving into the tower, which means Touga has spent three days not knowing where the hell his sister is. He’s off balance when he arrives at the tower and I’m pretty sure he has no clue what’s going on. He starts out with “you have no reason to move into a dorm” before realising that cold and disapproving isn’t the way to go and course correcting to “I mean, you’re the only sister I’ve got”. Which is also the wrong move, considering what Nanami currently believes.

I’m not sure why Touga goes along with the fiction they’re not siblings, especially since he seems actually sad about it. At a guess it’s half “Akio clearly wants her to believe this and he’s right here” and half “this might actually play into my plans, better think it over rather than clearing it up on impulse”.

At this point Nanami sees Akio and Anthy. _That’s not what she wanted._ Is that what Touga wanted? Is that where romanticising her brother could have led?

It’s worth noting that while we know Akio will force Anthy if she resists, and that Anthy’s consent in this situation with her older brother is dubious, rape is not really part of the horror here. Anthy not only takes an active role but almost a dominant one, rising up over Akio at the end. Nanami’s not seeing the possibility that her brother might force her, but the possibility that her consent to his advances might lead to something this devoid of any love or tenderness, something this warped. The question of what Touga wants this episode is one I can’t help coming back to, but it’s not his episode. The important thing here is what Nanami wants.

The next morning Nanami is no longer answering the mobile phone, but is still listening to its messages. It’s become almost a talisman to her now. Horrifying, because she can hear the echo of herself in the girls calling, but also a part of Touga that she can still hold onto.

The scene in the greenhouse echoes the disconnection of the previous scene that took place there. Touga doesn’t have his phone now, but he’s still with one girl while talking to another — all his words are meant for Nanami, who he’s seen outside. When Nanami runs in to plead with him Touga pretty much sets an ultimatum. If she wants to keep him away from other girls, she’ll have to claim him herself. Is he deliberately trying to follow in Akio and Anthy’s footsteps, here? It’s one of those moments where the Kiryuus seem to muddy the roles of Prince and Bride and in doing so raise some questions about what they actually are. If Touga sets himself up as a desirable object Nanami has to fight to own, is he setting himself up as Rose Bride? Is this the case even if he’s modelling their situation on Anthy’s claim to own Dios in order to protect him? Does the Prince protect the Bride or does the Bride protect the Prince, and is the answer to this question different depending on whether the Bride is a princess or a witch?

When the phone rings after Nanami’s left alone she realises she’s just like the girl on the other end and throws it in reaction. This is probably when she decides to transfer. She doesn’t want what Touga seems to be offering, but he also won’t let her alone if they’re in close quarters. So she decides, in a surprisingly mature move, the best and healthiest thing to do is just to leave.

When the phone rings at night Chu-Chu answers it, which may just be a gag or an indication that Anthy is in on this. It sounds like a girl on the phone, but then when Nanami asks who it is it’s Akio saying that Kiryuu Touga is waiting.

I do wonder whether Nanami thinks Touga might be Ends of the World at this point. She goes to confront him, to tell him she’s leaving and to demand to know who her brother really is. He’s the one who gave her her ring and permission to duel, so it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to come to.

It’s not him, though, it’s Akio. Who turns up on a mobile phone, shattering the window of the mansion. Connecting to Nanami only through the mobile phone, which is intimately connected with Touga. Shattering the home she thought she had.

Touga is once again pretty damn opaque. He seems surprised when Nanami rejects him, which means that he was fully prepared to go through with it if she didn’t. What he doesn’t seem, though, is particularly unhappy about being rejected. He moves on very quickly to “if that’s not what you want, what do you want?” rather than arguing the point. Does Touga even know what he wants? Maybe it’s not important, the important thing here is that this is Nanami’s decision.

Nanami’s answer to what she does want is ultimately that she wants to surpass Touga. This makes sense when you consider how much she’s clung to him for her sense of specialness. If she’s more special than Touga, all by herself, she won’t need him. She’ll be able to find the confidence to leave.

Utena recognises how much Nanami has been manipulated into this situation, but not the agency she had in its final outcome. She correctly blames Touga for setting up the situation, but tries to talk him out of going through with the duel rather than Nanami. Touga has a lot of power over Nanami even when he’s presenting himself as her Bride, but Nanami isn’t irrelevant here and Utena’s treating her as if she is.

Touga and Anthy’s expressions during the duel are identical. Neither of them does anything at all. It’s Anthy’s least active duel in this arc and Touga neither talks to Nanami nor gets in the car. Both of them look blank and sad, as if they regret that this is happening despite how huge a part they’ve both had in bringing it about.

Touga’s practically been Nanami’s Bride before — he was allowed on the arena in the first arc, and Utena and Nanami were fighting over him far more than over Anthy. There, he was calculating, letting things play out exactly as far as he wanted them to before calling for Nanami to stop and comforting her to both impress Utena and bring Nanami back to heel. Now, he does nothing to stop or affect the duel and, after it’s over, seems to vanish from the scene entirely. Nanami is crying, but Touga isn’t even on screen.

Instead he’s in bed with Akio. This is similar to the aftermath of Saionji’s duel, where we see Touga and Akio discussing it while having sex. But there both of them were sighing and posing as they talked, before ending with the act of intercourse. Here, Akio sighs and poses, but Touga remains half-curled against the end of the bed, looking away as he tries to decide what to do about Nanami now. He tells Akio that he intends to seduce her, that a brother and sister not bound by blood is “more romantic”, and Akio seems to approve, scolding him for being a “bad brother” in the same way he told him to “be nice to your friend” as they have sex.

Touga never follows through on this, though. For the rest of the anime he and Nanami are presumably living in the same house — at least, Nanami is neither in the tower nor begging for houseroom elsewhere — but we never see them talk again until after the revolution. Touga instead seeks Saionji out more and tries to figure out, and act on, his feelings for Utena. During the badminton game Shiori and Kozue watch resentfully, but Touga isn’t there to mind that Nanami is moving on.

The last shot of _Romance of the Dancing Girls_ is Touga’s phone lying on Akio’s couch, abandoned and disconnected. Touga’s never seen using it again, either, so while it’s not far from the balcony it does seem as if he never picks it up.

In a way it feels like Nanami frees them both, not by sacrificing herself as Anthy did, but by refusing to. Touga can, and must, decide for himself what he wants without his sister driving away anyone too persistent, and try to rebuild an emotional connection with Saionji who isn’t bound to always return to him by shared blood. Nanami can figure out who she is outside her brother’s shadow, connect to people instead of holding herself above them as Touga’s sister, and apply her protective streak and ability to care to people who deserve it.

Rather than retreating into the intense incestuous dyad Akio and Anthy share, where they have feelings only for each other and everyone else is set dressing, Nanami has forced them both out into the world.


End file.
